Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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CATEGORY: COURTS  Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez Source: Fox SA news Read time: 2.3 minutes This Happened A specialty court in the San Antonio, Texas metropolitan area that deals with domestic violence recently received certification as an agency trained in trauma-informed care Who Did This? This specialty court is the brainchild of Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez who was elected to the bench in 2018 and then spearheaded the creation of this specialty court to use a more therapeutic approach to justice. A registered Democrat, she is openly gay and advocates for LGBTQ issues [1]. The judge is married to psychologist Stacy Speedlin Gonzalez who helped advocate for the specialty court. In 2020, the judge was sanctioned by the Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct and ordered to remove a pride flag and other pride paraphernalia from her courtroom after a local defense lawyer filed a complaint. The judge claimed this was a personal attack because she believed the defense lawyer was homophobic and xenophobic [2]. The defense lawyer, however, Flavio Hernandez, appears to be Hispanic, as is Speedlin Gonzalez. The judge appealed the order and won four years later. She did not return the flag to court because she didn’t want to deal with more potential grievances [3]. In 2022, Transportation Security Administration agents found a handgun in the judge’s carry-on bag as she tried to board a plane. The gun had a loaded magazine inserted in it and a bullet chambered [4]. She paid a $2,475 fine 9 [5]. The certification comes from The Ecumenical Center, based in San Antonio. The center provides counseling, workshops, and other community services. The Premise Judge Speedlin Gonzalez’s specialty court was created in 2020 to work with first-time domestic violence offenders who also struggle with substance abuse. It takes a public health approach to develop treatment plans for perpetrators to access community services. The judge meets with perpetrators every other week to make sure they are following their treatment plans [6]. Once those first-time offenders complete the one-year requirement, their case is dismissed and expunged, giving them what the judge says is a true second chance. Analysis Other courts in the world have adopted trauma-informed frameworks but were not awarded a certification. The certification has no formal standing with judicial practice or government agencies. It is a product created by the South Texas Trauma Informed Care Consortium, which is a group formed in 2018 in partnership with the City of San Antonio Metro Health department and a local health center. The Ecumenical Center serves as the certifying entity for the Consortium. Details were not provided, but if it was like other trauma-informed trainings it would have included few actionable practices to implement. Trauma-informed training is more about the installation of an intellectual framework to indoctrinate participants to believe that life-threatening trauma impacts health, emotions, behaviors, character traits, and relationships. Victims of trauma thereby need to be treated as fragile and require special handling to avoid being retriggered and further damaged. It was not clear how the trauma-informed certification would alter court practices. Consistent with this framework, Speedlin Gonzalez does not consider the perpetrators in her court to be criminals. Instead, they are victims of trauma. “We get them sober, we treat the trauma, we give them skills so that they don’t come back into the criminal justice system and do not reoffend and that opens bed at the jail for true criminals not traumatized people that have mental health issues,” said Speedlin Gonzalez. The executive director of the Ecumenical Center, which provided the certification, claimed the trauma-informed care approach has been proven to work. There are, however, little to no research data showing that employees who are forced to take trauma-informed training have knowledge deficits that necessitate the training. Rather, supporters of trauma-informed care assert that such training is an implied good that can’t be anything but helpful. Research studies have shown that participants in trauma-informed trainings often perceive themselves to be better informed and more competent, but there is zero evidence that trainings improve outcomes of any type of agency work. Why Is This Happening? Trauma-informed care is part of the spectrum of neo-Marxist, postmodern ideologies that assert humans are highly malleable from oppressive forces in society. Programs have been springing up frequently in the past ten years in schools, medicine, addiction, and nonprofit charities that focus on social justice. The ideology also finds traction with judges with utopian visions for rehabilitating criminals. It’s unusual to see faith-based organizations promoting the trauma-informed movement, probably because of the underlying radical premise of the trauma-informed movement that there is no inherent fixed human nature and all aspects of humans are highly malleable from environment. Perhaps the Ecumenical Center is involved because, in the ecumenical mission of trying to bring together disparate Christian denominations, the Center believes the trauma-informed ideology shares a utopian vision of a better world. REFERENCES [1] Trellis. Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez: Professional background and legal expertise. Accessed 6/8/2024. https://trellis.law/judge/rosie.speedlin.gonzalez [2] Elizabeth Kuhr, NBC News (4/21/2020). Texas judge says she was forced to remove pride flag from courtoom. https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/texas-judge-says-she-was-forced-remove-pride-flag-courtroom-n1188891 [3] The Whitley Law Firm (3/1/2023). Bexar County judge wins appeal on displaying rainbow flag in courtroom. Accessed 6/8/2024. [4] Dillon Collier, KSAT.com (9/27/2022). ‘Oversight on my part’: Judge Speedlin Gonzalez found with loaded gun at San Antonio International Airport. Accessed 6/8/2024. https://www.ksat.com/news/ksat-investigates/2022/09/27/oversight-on-my-part-judge-speedlin-gonzalez-found-with-loaded-gun-at-san-antonio-international-airport/ [5] Dillon Collier, KSAT.com (10/14/2022). Judge Speedlin Gonzalez pays $2,475 fine for loaded gun incident at San Antonio International Airport. Accessed 6/8/2024. https://www.ksat.com/news/ksat-investigates/2022/10/14/judge-speedlin-gonzalez-pays-2475-fine-for-loaded-gun-incident-at-san-antonio-international-airport/ [6] The Bexar County Specialty Courts Coalition Resource Guide 2021. Accessed 6/8/2024). https://www.bexar.org/DocumentCenter/View/23613/BCSC-Coalition-Resource-Guide-PDF?bidId= Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe to our email notices of new posts on this page. Comments are closed.
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